perimeter homespun by Marcia Arrieta

Marcia Arrieta's perimeter homespun is part meditation, part equation. Both spare and delightfully baroque at the same time, the collection deftly explores the tensions between art and nature, the created world and the occurring one. Arrieta's poems cast a splendid web around the work created by other artists and writers, their translations of the known and unknown, spinning everything into an amazing pattern that both catches and reflects light.

—Kristy Bowen

Marcia Arrieta constructs exquisite thresholds here out of the pre-verbal and dreamt. De Chirico might walk here shining a minimalist strobe against the shadows. We revisit the surrealism of childhood in relic, totem. Remedios Varo, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Lorine Niedecker, Hildegard of Bingen inhabit this text trance as “she draws an expedition map.” There’s a barefootedness to the language here, landscapes animaled, plants and ghosts. We are constantly aware of Arrieta’s margined space, at turns spare and sumptuous. Gingko leaves drift. Garden or forest? “We build the entrance”

—Anne Gorrick

The natural world is never distant in these short and subtle poems, yet they are not poems about nature. Each poem, each page, is a subtle conjuring, often built from juxtaposed or cascading images, all the while referencing art and artists, poems and poets, philosophy and science. In an introductory epigraph, Hildegard of Bingen informs us that “There is the music of Heaven in all things,” and we find that confirmed here, in poems that sometimes wander from the natural world into the world of dreams. It is a satisfying book. You’ll want to read these pieces more than once.

—Bob Heman

Marcia Arrieta is the granddaughter of Spanish immigrants: farmers, laborers, philosophers, musicians, housekeepers, laundrymen, cooks—and the daughter of the working class. As a native Californian her roles are many—wife, mother of three sons, teacher, poet, artist, traveler, and editor/publisher of Indefinite Space, a poetry/art journal, for 27 years. In her career, along with home and classroom, she has chosen to walk in fields, forests, on islands, along beaches, and in the mountains, gardens, libraries, and museums across continents for insight and inspiration. She has an MFA from Vermont College and is the author of two poetry collections: archipelago counterpoint (BlazeVOX) and triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme (Otoliths), with three chapbooks: thimbles, threads (Dancing Girl), the curve against the linear (Toadlily), and experimental: (Potes & Poets).

Book Information:

· Paperback: 104 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-338-6